FRANKENSTEIN
CASTLE RUIN - RHINELAND
Grab Your Pitchfork
Along
a winding road in the Rhineland-Palatine region between Kaiserslautern
(near where Ramstein and Landstuhl military bases are located) and
Mannheim, near the wine road town of Bad Duerkheim, the red limestone
castle ruin stands ominously above a tiny little village named Frankenstein.
The Frankenstein Castle of Rheinland-Pfalz was first built in 1100
and expanded in the 14th and 15th Centuries. It was controlled by the
Bishops of Speyer and for a time the Monastery at Limburg. From the
former tower one can see the value of the position over the valley
with a 190 degree view of the road and now railroad track far below.
The main rail line to 
Kaiserslautern
runs through a tunnel right under the ruins. This
Burg Frankenstein castle has a fairly
sketchy history and is not even marked on some maps, suggestive of
hidden secrets? There
is no admission or visitor center. One can park at the rail crossing
and hike up a steep path which rises behind the village cemetery up
to the ruins and a nature trail. A few remaining walls where the former
main hall stood. Suffering the ravages of time and struggles for control
of the region, the castle at Frankenstein was occupied by the Spanish
and the French (see Hardenburg
Castle) in
various wars and suffered much of its distruction in the Thirty Years
War of European Succession.
One
of literature’s
and the movies’ most enduring monsters
was created by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley after one stormy night in
Geneva, Switzerland when she and
future hubby, Percy Bysshe Shelley, along with England’s
romantic poet-hedonist Lord Byron and his doctor John Polidori,
while sitting around the fireplace in 1816, bet
they could write scary stories better that the purveyors of cheap scary
literature of the day known as “Penny Dreadfuls” (see Villa
Diodoti Gothic Summer). Byron started a vampire story, naming
his villain after the fellow who cut down trees at his ancestral
Nottinghamshire
home Newstead Abbey (see Byron's
Newstead Abbey), but grew quickly bored.
Polidori later finished and published the story as “The
Vampyre”.
Percy Shelley scribbled some 
middling
haunting verse. But 19 year old Mary, who had never had a novel published
before, invented
Victor Frankenstein
- a man of science so infected by his power of knowledge and ego, made
a creature from the parts of the dead, only to have the result of his
over-reaching ego destroy him and those he loved. Inspired by the social
arguments
between Byron and Shelly, a
nightmare "dream" influenced by
the experiments of Luigi Galvani who had recently stimulated dead muscle
tissue with electricity, and her young romantic trysts with the married
Percy Shelly in the graveyard of St. Pancras Paris Chuch
in
London
(see Mary
Shelley's London "Birth" of Frankenstein), Mary
Shelley created one of the enduring works of gothic literature.
The novel
of Frankenstein sets the hero coming from Switzerland to study at
the University at Ingolstadt, (see Ingolstadt
- Bavarain Army Museum) one of
the first centers of learning in old Germany, in the walled city 30
minutes
north
of
Munich
in Bavaria.
The monster actually had no name,
but became synonymous with the name Frankenstein. Speculation has resulted
in a search for a connection between the name and a real place. Mary
and Percy Shelly traveled down the Rhine River on a return back to England
from Switzerland (see Rhine Falls Schaffhausen) and may have visited
one of two castles along the journey.
Strikingly,
the Castle Frankenstein ruins clinging to a rock over-looking the small
town with the infamous name, one can picture the angry villagers
with pitchforks storming the castle while Boris Karloff rages from the
burning battlements. And if peering close, one can almost see the face
of the monster in the rocky crag to which the castle ruins cling, which
might have inspired a young woman author surrounded by men of notoriously
monstrous talent and egos.
As
for other Castle Frankensteins, there is a beautiful castle overlooking
the Rhine
River - Burg Gutenfels that some tour operators refer to as
Frankenstein (it fits better on the boat tour) but was actually built
by the von Falkensteins (see Rhine
Castles Ehrenfels and Sooneck).
The most familiar Frankenstein Castle is the ruin in Darmstadt near Frankfurt
with legends of a murderous doctor which has also claimed the literary
Frankenstein inspiration mantle
(see Frankenstein
Castle Darmstadt ) and is easier to reach than the castle
ruin in Rhineland-Pfalz. In the end, the 19 year old authoress of the
world's
most famous monster may not have set foot in any castle named Frankenstein,
but legends grow in mysterious ways. © Bargain
Travel Europe
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See also:
FOOTSTEPS OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
GERMAN
KING'S FANTASY CASTLE - NEUSCHWANSTEIN
AIR BERLIN
AIRLINES TO DUSSELDORF
LUFTWAFFE
MEMORIES - DEUTSCHES MUSEUM
